


Static

by memeicorn



Category: Youtubers, markiplier - Fandom
Genre: Angst, Break Up, Extended Metaphors, Internal Conflict, Just A Bunch Of Random Bullshit Idk, M/M, Songfic, ventfic
Language: English
Status: Completed
Published: 2017-07-07
Updated: 2017-07-07
Packaged: 2018-11-28 20:56:08
Rating: Teen And Up Audiences
Warnings: No Archive Warnings Apply
Chapters: 1
Words: 2,644
Publisher: archiveofourown.org
Story URL: https://archiveofourown.org/works/11426043
Author URL: https://archiveofourown.org/users/memeicorn/pseuds/memeicorn
Summary: Of all the day’s surprises, nothing surprises Ethan less than finding him there. Associations between the wrong people and the right places can make prisons out of the safest havens.The guest reaches out to him, hand outstretched, and asks for a dance.What else was he to do but dance?





	Static

**Author's Note:**

> everything in center-aligned italics is from the song “static” by minimall - [pls to be listening to it here !!](https://minimall.bandcamp.com/track/static) special thx to mar for letting me use their words to make more words

 

 _i shouldn’t have talked to you over the phone_  
_it’s your voice - almost made me feel like i was home_  
_and i shouldn’t have talked to you all on my own  
_ _i know, i know, i know_

 

Ethan always found himself in the strangest of places.

A lot of the time, they were in the dark - basements, back gardens - anywhere he could close his eyes and pretend he was blending in with the background, pretend like he himself was a shadow.  

Other times, they were better lit, but the space around him still felt darker than any eclipse. Whether it was the muggy air of a bedroom on a summer night, or in less fortunate cases, the beeps and murmurs he traced from behind a hospital curtain, he was never able to shrug the darkness off his shoulders when it was convenient. Despite his efforts, he had a hitchhiker.

The darkest of all was a space less physical, into which he could feel himself being launched every time the tidal waves came. He arrived there at every _click_ of a dead phone line, and with every knot and kink he tried to flatten out of his coiled cord. He departed from that space only when he heard the earth sing to him, reminding him that everything felt better in the soil, the dirt, and all the tangible reality that he was _alive_ and could _feel at all_ in the first place.

The space, nebulous and foggy, became his reluctant shelter for all the times he didn’t feel like he had a home. His hands were whiskers, tracing along the inner walls like a maze, trying to find the dimensions, measurements, and places where the walls connect. Of course, they changed every time he returned, offering him no solace in the comfort of consistency. The only real comfort he found there was in its mystique, in the relent he felt in not being able to know, but at the same time never needing to.

 

 _there were twisted, grassy tongues_  
_we got too close to blood and breath_  
_those warm breezes filled our lungs  
_ _sending knives into nerves & chests_

 

The lonesome times were why he built it in the first place. As alien as it made him feel, it was his repose from the chaos when nothing else could be. When he came to recall the tight feeling of smeared, dried blood on his fingertips, he tossed up his rope ladder and climbed - sometimes a clamber, but always a climb.

And sure enough, he came back to his lonely space time and time again, but he wasn’t always alone. He would have guests for a number of different reasons - some more intimate than others - but he never saw the danger in it until his company started convincing him to stay there for nights on end.

The first time Ethan was coaxed into an overnight stay ended in an impassioned bolero, a novel confusion that he navigated with missteps and tremors. It was the first time he had ever seen his space with the lights on. For a moment, nothing was lost in its usual blizzard and fog - all he saw was the two of them, hand in hand, dancing in a quiet room. He was almost disappointed at the sight of it, after all those years he spent in vain trying to circumnavigate. But the instant he saw it, he knew it was exactly what he needed, and his guest knew it too - much better than Ethan could have ever known.

The two of them came back down to earth adorned with matching halos. Ethan’s guest easily shook the light out of his thick brown curls. “See? It wasn’t that big of a deal after all,” he could remember him saying, but only Ethan knew the years of tension that had dissipated into those walls before then. Ethan’s halo remained his crown, the bright yellow light refracting into grass off the blue of his hair.

 

 _i have had it, if i let myself float_  
_with my mind twisting erratic  
_ _i might feel you through the static_

 

And this is where he finds himself now.

When he shuts the door behind him, he’s all alone in his brand new apartment, surrounded by moving-boxes full of his belongings. It reeks of its freshly laden wooden flooring, still pristine from recent renovations - Ethan can’t decide if he loves or hates the smell. He toes his shoes and socks off, feeling obligated not to track dirt inside. The soles of his feet, damp from sweat, come down on the matte wood, and he feels the grain under his toes. It’s almost novel. He’s never lived anywhere with so little carpeting.

Of course, it isn’t quiet - he does still live in an apartment complex in Los Angeles, after all - but the first sounds he notices are the softest hums, the daemons, the purrs he knows will fade into white noise before long. It’s a new kind of comfort to feel the murmurs envelop him. Each individual thread of sound weaves tightly into the seams of his mind, much unlike the clouds of garbled noise with which he had grown to live before.

 

 _i have had it, if i let myself go_  
_with my mind twisting erratic  
__i might feel you through the static_

 

When he settles there, seated on his bed’s neatly tucked duvet, he breathes. It had taken him so much effort to come this far. Making the right steps at every unlikely turn landed him in this spot. He remains on this thought for a few self-indulgent moments, and he puts the rest of his inner processes on pause.

He stays like that until he suddenly sees static creep into the edges of his vision, and a spark courses abruptly through all of his muscles.

 _No, no, no, I came here to get away from all this,_ he thinks in a dizzy panic. He bolts off the bed and rushes to the bathroom, barely able to locate it in his new home. Arms trembling and hands clutching the edges of the sink, he takes a cautious glance in the mirror. There, plain as day, was his visage as expected, but adorned with a halo, the bright yellow light refracting into grass off the blue of his hair.

 

 _even if i’m empty i can still be a home_  
_hang your pictures on the walls of my skull_  
_come on over, walk around all alone  
_ _i hope that i’m comfortable_

 

And just like that, he’s back in a flash to his space less physical.

It’s as he remembered it, too - he half expected funhouse walls and floors that wobble beneath his feet, but none of that appears before him. No, instead he finds himself in the same quiet room he saw clearly for the first time that fateful night. That wasn’t the only invariant, either - upon his apparition there, Ethan also finds himself under the gaze of his former houseguest, for the first time in however many months.

Of all the day’s surprises, nothing surprises Ethan less than finding him there. It was no wonder he hadn’t paid a visit to his space less physical for so long. Associations between the wrong people and the right places can make prisons out of the safest havens.

The guest reaches out to him, hand outstretched, and asks for a dance.

_What else was he to do but dance?_

 

 _i have had it, if i let myself float_  
_with my mind twisting erratic  
_ _i might feel you through the static_

 

Their movement is intoxicating, all hip-sways and interlocking steps - one forward with one back. To Ethan’s credit, he hadn’t spent a lot of time perfecting the craft since the first time, but it almost felt hard-coded into his system, like a program interrupt he had always been preparing to handle. His days of terpsichorean unfamiliarity had long since passed.

His guest’s grip on his hands is warm and dry. It’s so unlike the cold clamminess he remembers in his tactile mind - he had grown to hate the feeling and resent the whole memory because of it. Ethan had never recalled so fondly of a face he had nearly forgotten before. He hesitates to think of this person as a friend - there was something beyond acquaintanceship that made their connection difficult to quantify. In the back of his mind, he settles on the word “nonstranger”. Yes, that would do just fine for now.

Ethan finally affords himself a glance into the eyes of this nonstranger. Instantaneously, it activates something in his mind. The eyes of deep blue he discovers there begin to retell all his stories, and recount feelings of isolation, loneliness, and fear. But just as there are tales of strife, he sees tales of triumph - of perseverance, accomplishment, and reward - in equal measure. The sheer influx of emotional recollection wracks Ethan’s delicate frame, causing him to lose his footing and stumble backward.

“You okay?” the nonstranger asks, in a syrupy baritone Ethan had, until now, stowed away, amidst the deepest recesses of his subconscious.

 

 _i have had it, if i let myself go_  
_with my mind twisting erratic  
_ _i might feel you through the static_

 

“Am I okay?” Ethan echoes, scandalized. “You dragged me back here and brought up all this shit I’ve been trying so hard to keep down… am I supposed to be okay?”

“Come on, Ethan,” the other replies. His eyes are desperate to meet Ethan’s defiant gaze, which is trained elsewhere on the barren walls. “Try to remember everything we worked for. You know I showed you the good aspects too. Do you really want all that to disappear?”

Ethan’s eyes drift to the nonstranger’s dark curls of hair, fixating less on what is there and more on what isn’t. “You aren’t who you said you were, Tyler.” Something cracks and breaks inside Ethan when he says the name. His voice falters as he feels tears begin to well up behind his eyes. “You tried to convince me you would fix everything, but all you did was make it worse.”

“I was only trying to help,” Tyler responds defensively. “None of that was for me, it was for you. And it still is, okay?” He tries to pull Ethan back into their partnered dancing stance. “I’m here to help remind you how perfect everything was back then.”

“Well maybe I don’t want to be reminded,” Ethan interjects, half-laughing out of frustration. He wants to slap Tyler’s hands away, but some spectral force or magnetism keeps them interlocked with his own, leaving Ethan unable to budge. “Maybe it’s gonna help me more if I forget everything that happened and start over, y’know? Have you ever thought of that?”

“I saw how happy you were,” Tyler coaxes. “Don’t you want to feel like that again?”

“I don’t need to recycle my old happiness,” he says, and when he says it, his shaking hands clutch tighter into Tyler’s palms, wringing around his bones & tendons, dragging skin against skin. He could feel his grip slip in the warm, dry contact. The sliver of cold air that slithers through the cracks between their palms makes Ethan shiver; he feels the stifling heat of disaster being siphoned off his skin along with it. He catches the smallest glimpse of letting go with all his nerve endings, and it’s a terrifyingly unfamiliar feeling. “Maybe…” he starts, voice trembling, “...maybe I don’t need you to help me feel happiness at all.”

Tyler’s eyes change, darkening from cloudless skies to murky oceans. When Ethan meets them again, he hears the dull ringing in his eardrums of taunts from all his memories. In spite of them being so loud, though, he’s sure of what he needs to do next. Were he not to wash his hands of the cataclysm now, there would never be another opportunity for him to break free.

“I’m sorry, Tyler.”

Ethan draws in one last deep breath, then releases completely.

 

 _and if we’re out of time_  
_you could have told me not to lose my mind_  
_and if we’re done this time_  
_you could have said it was the end of the line_

 

It’s stunted and quick, like ripping off a bandage. The first thing he feels is falling; he falls for what could be hours, days, even weeks. Time seems to slow down from the moment it happens, and all he can see is the clear night sky around him. His entire body is braced for the inevitable collision, and he cuts through the air like a knife, hair and clothes whipping in every direction as he plummets a distance he didn’t even know he’d attained in the first place. He closes his eyes and keeps them firmly shut the whole way down - he knows full well that he won’t be able to telegraph his fall, but also knows that soon enough it won’t matter anyway.

 

 _i have had it, if i let myself float_  
_with my mind twisting erratic  
_ _i might feel you through the static_

 

When he finally lands, it’s straight back into his body. He takes a couple of stumbling steps backward, reeling from the sudden stop. He’s back home - more specifically, in his new home. It makes sense, considering that his memories of being at home were the last that felt real to him. Ethan begins to paw at his arms, clothes, and hair. To his pleasant surprise, his senses process every texture and ridge as they should.

Realising that he’s heaving pants and gasps, Ethan takes a moment to even out his breath, placing one hand on his chest to feel his heartbeat slow. He looks around and sees the cold tile of the bathroom floor and pristine porcelain of the sink, just as he left them. Knowing what he needs to examine next, his breath hitches in his chest. He’s terrified, but he’s been this brave thus far. Drawing in a gulp of air, he looks up at himself in the mirror.

 

 _i have had it, if i let myself go_  
_with my mind twisting erratic  
_ _i might feel you through the static_

 

His skin is slightly ashen, but otherwise unscathed. His pupils are dilated, but his eyes and all the rest of his features have remained as they were. As he examines himself, Ethan finds nothing but a few visceral signs of fear, those which quickly dissolve as he watches the colour flow back into his face. Looking down, he sees that his hands are still his hands - albeit a bit shaky - and for the first time since his first overnight stay at the space less physical, he feels like they work properly. It finally hits Ethan that he’s come out as the same person he was going in, but this time, he feels like his mind and body link tightly together, communicating as they should through all the right nervous passageways.

Just then, he notices one other thing. Turning his gaze back up to the mirror, barely above eye level, he finds the top of his head reflecting a deep ocean blue, the product of a recent salon trip. That’s it - there are no rays of sunshine or blades of grass poking out through his scalp. His head is no longer a captive of his veritable crown of thorns, nor is there any more gold paralysing his mind under its atomic weight.

Against the oppressive will of the nonstranger, Ethan finally fills up his lungs to their full capacity, a feeling he’s never known before now. By letting go, he was able to take hold of so much more that he never knew to lay below.

He’s finally free, and it’s so much more than he ever could have asked for.

 

 _i shouldn’t have talked to you over the phone  
_ _i know, i know, i know_

 

**Author's Note:**

> fun fact: i wanted to know if there was an adjectival version of “dance” like there is with “music” (musical) or “art” (artistic). i thought “kinetic” (of or pertaining to motion), but i googled it & it turns out there’s a more specific word - “terpsichorean”. it’s the most pedantic word i’ve ever used in any piece of writing and i love it so so much


End file.
